Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Directions

This is the first post on my brand new blog. The essential difference between this blog and the old one is a change of "voice" and focus.

Unlike the "catch all" nature of the old blog, this one will have a sharper focus, specifically on things technical (mostly code/mathematics/algorithms etc - but "technical" is used very broadly - I could very well end up dissecting the Black Scholes Equation for pricing derivatives, for example.). I will create a separate blog for non technical ruminations (TBD).

So what's happening on my end? Life is insanely busy (as usual) and I am meeting great people (as usual) and situations (as usual) and the great difficulty (as always) is choosing among the zillion challenges to tackle next. "So little done, so much to do", to quote Cecil Rhodes, but hey it beats a boring, "normal" life any day.

On the technical/programming front, I am investigating the impact of various (language) interpreter designs on execution time. Over the coming weekend, for example, I am trying to get some sense of how much overhead trampolining adds to interpretation time (vs a normal recursive descent parser).

So that is what I'll write about in the next few entries. And then there is the reinforcement learning library I wrote for the good folks in the DRDO (Defence Research Development Organization for non Indian readers). I could probably spin that off into an open source project once I (find some time to) tidy it up a bit.

Then there's the derivation of concurrent algorithms, the relational-algebra to SQL query generator thingy I've been fiddling with off and on for a while now, and thoughts on programming with typed channels and machine learnng algorithms as programming primitives. Lots of interesting things to write about.

I'm an assembly worker churning out java, jsps for eCommerce sites ... filling shopping carts, order processing, this that on top of this framework that app server...all mindless boring stuff. My heart lies somewhere else - Logic, Maths( Axiomatic set theories and fundamental mathematics, number theory, probability measure theory, analysis, abstract algebra ...) Algorithms, Automata, Computation theory, Programming Languages, and lots more. But I just cant seem to muster the courage to really take the plunge and go for an MS or may be an MTech from an IIT/IISc. I'll turn 26 soon and keep thinking if its all too late.Keep it going and good luck.